Afghans go hungry as U.S. and Taliban blame each other
Ahmed Shah Jamshidi and his family go to bed hungry every night, but not because food is in short supply. They just can’t afford enough of it.
“We were poor before the takeover. Now, we have nothing,” said Jamshidi, 42, who lost his job as a security guard after aid cuts crippled the economy. His village in western Afghanistan, in the mountains outside of Herat, had already endured years of drought, forcing most farmers to sell off livestock and look for work in nearby towns and cities.
Throughout the country, millions of lives are similarly threatened. Childhood malnutrition is on the rise, and nearly half of all Afghans don’t have enough to eat, according to the latest figures from the United Nations. Jamshidi’s family is among them, even as he scrambles to keep his wife and seven children from starving. He borrows money from shopkeepers to buy increasingly expensive items like potatoes and cooking oil that his wife uses to make the family’s main meal: a pot of watery stew.
Some days there is no food and “the children scream from the hunger at night,” he said. “Sometimes all we have is donated stale bread and tea. And when we run out of tea, I just gather grass to boil with the water.”
Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis has been building for decades, driven not just by persistent poverty and too little rain, but also by generations of war and an economy almost entirely dependent on international support. Still, it was the Biden administration’s decision to halt aid in response to the Taliban takeover that put the country on the brink of catastrophe.
“Not another cent will go to a future government of Afghanistan that doesn’t uphold basic human rights,” State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters after the fall of Kabul in August. It was a “knee-jerk” response, in the recent words of one U.S. official involved in those policy discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about them.
The State Department’s refusal to recognize the Taliban also made it impossible for the country’s new rulers to access billions of dollars in foreign assets. Parallel moves by the
World Bank and the European Union brought Afghanistan’s economy crashing down.
As winter approached and humanitarian groups warned of famine, the Biden administration came under increasing pressure to prevent a catastrophe. In recent months, the United States and others began to funnel money through the United Nations and groups that bypass Taliban leadership. Yet these hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid are a small fraction of the billions that once kept the country afloat.
The economic isolation of
Afghanistan has done little to moderate the Taliban’s hard-line rule. But the consequences have been devastating for the Afghan people, especially the poor.
Lal Mohammed, Jamshidi’s neighbor in Dezwari, lost his job as a day laborer after the U.S. withdrawal. Desperate to find work, he made four attempts to cross illegally into Iran. Border guards beat him and turned him back. The 65-year-old has resorted to subsistence farming with his sons.
Mohammed’s entire family is eating less, including his pregnant daughter.
“I feel weaker,” said
Nour Bibi, a 30-year-old mother of two. “I don’t know exactly what’s wrong. I never had this condition before.”
Mohammed wants to take her to the doctor, but he can’t spare the $2 for a taxi.
‘HUGE CONUNDRUM’
Even though Afghanistan has avoided famine — at least for now — its economy remains in tatters, and neither the international community nor the Taliban is taking responsibility for the hunger crisis.
“This is a huge conundrum for policymakers,” said a senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the record. “There is no easy fix. There is no ‘turning the taps back on,’ ” he said, referring to the billions of dollars in aid that flowed into the country over the past two decades.
“The humanitarian situation remains a central
and driving imperative of American policymaking,” he said, but “the onus is increasingly on the Taliban.”
The Biden administration has said the Taliban must form an inclusive government and guarantee the rights of minorities and women if it wants to win recognition from the international community. The group has responded by cracking down on dissent, shuttering schools for girls and forcing women to cover from head to toe.
“Our fight was against the invaders to free Afghanistan from occupation and establish Islamic law,” acting foreign minister
Amir Khan Muttaqi told
The Washington Post. “There will be no change in our stance.”
Asked whether the group would soften its interpretation of Islamic law in exchange for humanitarian relief, Muttaqi was indignant: “In the past, our people were killed in bombings and raids, even the mother of bombs was used on them. So do you think that was better?”
Residents in Dezwari say they have not received help from the Taliban or outside groups. The withdrawal of U.S. forces was unnerving, said Jamshidi, but most people thought better days were ahead.
“We thought once the war was over, there would be even more jobs for us,” he said. “Instead, the United States left everything in disorder.”
Thousands of Afghan families have fled the countryside, only to face further deprivation in the cities.
Muhammed Azam Yaqub lost his livelihood when his farm was destroyed last summer in clashes between the Taliban and Afghan government forces. With no money to rebuild in his village and no way to support his family, he spent his savings to move them to Herat.
“We thought even if there is no work here, we can at least find help” from aid groups, he reasoned. “But we haven’t found anything.”
He now lives in a makeshift camp on the city’s edge, and his sons beg
door-to-door for food.
“The hunger, it makes us weak,” said Yaqub’s mother-in-law, Shiringul. “I never thought our family would be in a situation like this.”
Other children from the camp, some as young as 4 or 5, are sent into Herat to shine shoes on street corners, making less than a dollar a day for their families to spend on food.
The Taliban’s deputy minister for refugees and repatriations admitted that the assistance it provides to displaced families is “insufficient” but blamed the international community.
“We are facing financial hardships,” Muhammad Arsala Kharutai said.
“When we arrived in Kabul, there was no money left in the government accounts.”
The Taliban’s deputy economic minister acknowledged in an interview last week that “people are suffering.”
“We have experienced a major revolution, and it has had its impacts,” Abdul
Latif Nazari said. “The people have to endure it to reach the next phase.”